Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 12

No one seems very surprised at the existence of mogwai. Not the father, played by the intelligent Hoyt Axton, not the mother, not the high school science teacher, not the apple-cheeked hero and heroine. It seems to me that not even in the fantasy world of a film such as this should the introduction into everyday life of an impossible thing cause such little startlement.

The instructions given to Axton on the three things one should never never never do to a mogwai on pain of terrible consequences-shine light in their eyes, let it get wet, and feed it after midnight-are never explored by Axton when he gets the creature. Even a schmuck asks for a book of instructions when he buys a microwave oven. And, of course, because it's an idiot plot, all three caveats are ignored so frivolously, so offhandedly, that we know from the moment we hear them that they have been entered merely to be transgressed.

But since everyone else in the film acts like a bonehead, how naive of us to pretend to amazement that the plot has been manipulated so cra.s.sly. For of fools there is no dearth in this film. Glynn Turman, as the high school science teacher who borrows one of the gremlin offspring to study, has just seen the wire cage containing the creature ripped open, has seen the creature grab a test tube and has heard the sound of the thing eating it, and yet he tracks it around the darkened schoolroom (he had been running a science film for his students and the lights were out) without having the common sense to turn on the lights. And though he knows the thing is ravenous enough to eat a test tube, fer chrissakes, he nonetheless acts like a fool and extends a candy bar, held in his naked hand, into the shadows under a desk. When we hear him scream, and later when we see him lying dead, just enough in shadow so we cannot tell how far up his body the evil gremlin ate, we are told by apologists for this film's systematic violence that "nothing is shown."

Yet we must remember that film is a simulacrum of life. It is not a "cartoon" (a subject I'll cover next time). A cartoon is a cartoon. Live-action is one remove from the real thing. And in this film we see people being smashed by a snowplow that goes right through their house, we see a woman hurled at a prodigious speed through a second-storey window, we see Harry Carey, Jr. stick his hand into a mailbox and hear the sound of gnawing, we see a mother's face b.l.o.o.d.y with the raking of talons. And we are expected to laugh. We are told this ain't for real, it's a cartoon. But if you chew off someone's arm, they will bleed to death, slowly and horribly. If you run a snowplow through someone's home and smash them, you will grind them to pulp. If you throw someone from a second-storey window at a prodigious speed, her neck will be broken. And no amount of breakdancing and beer-swilling and emulation of human behavior by malevolent fanged creatures can remove the rotten core of violence that poisons this entire film. It is, truly, The Muppet Chain Saw Ma.s.sacre.

Inconsistency: "If these evil gremlins get to water, they'll multiply forever. We have to keep them from water." This film takes place at Christmastime. There is snow everywhere. Last time I checked, snow was mostly made of water.

Rasa, tabula, one each.

Or should we simply point out, and accept wearily, the reality that this film is nothing but a cynical marketing device for Gizmo and Stripe dolls, Gremlin lunch buckets, mogwai pajamas, premiums, doodads, million-buck marketables?

It has been pointed out to me that I may not, at risk of bearing false witness, lay the onus of moral bankruptcy re Gremlins at Steven Spielberg's gate. This, I have been reminded, and scenarist Chris Columbus a.s.sured me in a recent telecon that it is so, is a film directed by Joe Dante, that Spielberg was off on location with Temple of Doom when Gremlins was in production. In all fairness, yes, this is Dante's work and is filled with the kind of violence Dante delivered in Hollywood Boulevard, Piranha, and The Howling. And it emanates from an original screenplay by Columbus (who wrote Reckless). But Columbus also told me that he went through several drafts of the script, over a period of months, with Spielberg himself, before he was given Dante as collaborator on another few pa.s.ses.

All this taken into consideration, true or false, each contributor's part in the action increased or softpedaled for whatever reasons of politics (perhaps in fear of a repeat of the Poltergeist fiasco, in which Spielberg was rumored to have done the direction while Tobe Hooper stood around the set with his thumb in his mouth, a rumor that time has proved to be utterly false and destructive to Hooper's reputation), it is Spielberg's bio that leads off the press kit furnished by Warner Bros. It is Spielberg's name above the t.i.tle in the TV Guide two-page advertis.e.m.e.nt. It is Spielberg's name that sold this film to ten-year-olds and their parents.

And in the same way that the mindless think Walt Disney wrote Bambi and Pinocchio, never having heard of Felix Salten or Carlo Collodi; in the same way that they think Rod Serling wrote every segment of The Twilight Zone; and in the same way that no amount of setting the record straight (with a knowing wink and an elbow nudge) will convince most people that Tobe Hooper, not Spielberg, directed Poltergeist; in that same way, and with equal responsibility, this is a Spielberg film bearing the freight of his cinematic vision and execution.

Perhaps I do sin against the innocent when I suggest that this movie fits neatly into the Spielberg canon because it lies under the shadow of his Gray Eminence throughout . . . but it's a belief I cannot, try as I might, shake from my considerations when appraising Gremlins.

And I suspect the free ride is over for Spielberg in terms of uncritical adoration. For Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom lets loose the Worms of Evil with its brutalization of children as a device to shock, and that's the first true glimpse of the darker side of the force that motivates the Lucas-Spielberg films-though it's there, subtly, in most of their movies, one way or another-and Gremlins fully opens that Pandora's Box: it combines, at last, the softest, most empty-headed, meretricious and dangerous elements of the entire Lucas-Spielberg genre.

And whether you call it Bedford Falls or Kingston Falls, Gremlins savages to evil effect a world that need not have been trashed so callously.

Steven Spielberg has more power, more freedom, more top of the mountain access to the best the industry has to offer, than anyone in the history of moviemaking. He has talent coming out of his ears. And I do not think the unquestioning adoration that has been visited on him is repaid by the sort of films he now seems inclined to make. It is presumptuous for me, or anyone, to tell an artist what to create; but it is the responsibility of the audience to alert a force as potent as Spielberg to the possibility that too much isolation, and too many yes-men, and too much money, and too much cynicism can turn the sweetest apple rotten to the core.

We have all taken bites from that apple. And what is worse than finding a Worm of Evil in the apple is finding half a Worm.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / February 1985 INSTALLMENT 7:.

In Which An Attempt Is Made To Have One's Cake And Eat It, Too

By this time we will have come clean with each other. We will have ceased trying to flummox one another. You will reluctantly admit that these are not actually "reviews" of films, because The n.o.ble Fermans a.s.semble the goods three months before the magazine is published; and that means that even if I review 2010, Supergirl, The River, Dune, and Paris, Texas (all five of which I'll see next week, 1218 November) immediately, those films will have opened and, in some cases, vanished before you get the dubious benefit of my appraisals. So insofar as being a theater guide to what you should lay out money to see, this column is academic. You'll have guessed well or badly on your own; you'll have been conned by advertising; or you'll have been warned off by word-of-mouth or by Roger Ebert. And for my part, I will admit that these are not "reviews" in the way, say, Ayjay's book columns serve you, because the books are still out there three months after pub date; but the films may only be accessible in a second-run house.

By reviewing what is coming out as far in advance of their national premieres as I can, I cut down the time-lag; and in some instances-Repo Man and Gremlins are the most recent examples-I can abet your own desires by talking up the former, which got a second pa.s.s at distribution, or by warning you off the latter, which hung around like a bad case of stomach flu for the entire summer, at least till they'd moved a million of those vile gremlin soft toys off the shelves.

But what is truly being done in these columns is what I like to think of as essays in the realm of film criticism. The discussion of trends, subtexts, effects on the art form and on the commonweal, I suppose in an attempt to broaden your appreciation of film as worthy art. Thus, when I read Gahan Wilson's column in The Twilight Zone magazine, and Gahan quite properly wails in pain at the glut of films he has endeavored to see, in order to review, during the summer avalanche, and he professes to going blind and insensitive after seven days of two screenings a day, I sympathize without reservation. And finally, as it must to all men, overload comes to Charles Foster Ellison; and I simply admit that I cannot see everything available in this genre in your behalf; and also admit that it may not be a race worth the candle to attempt to see them all, if the best I can do is a mere squib relating basic storyline topped with a smarta.s.s one-punch evaluation.

So you get no thoughts from me on The Last Starfighter, Sheena, Mutant, Red Dawn, Dreamscape, Conan the Destroyer, The Philadelphia Experiment, Night of the Comet and The NeverEnding Story. By the time those films got to the screening windows, I couldn't see the forest for the trees. (Understand: I am a movie freak, and in order that I don't overload on sf/fantasy films, I see a great many mainstream films, as well. And I must confess that in a world where I can enjoy Garbo Talks, Amadeus, A Soldier's Story, The River and Beverly Hills Cop, I choose not to pollute my precious bodily fluids with Sheena and Conan and films notable only by the number of teenage female b.r.e.a.s.t.s available for leering at by microcephalic schoolboys.) Eschewing semiotics and structuralism, techniques better left to the functionaries who rapturously give us shot-by-shot a.n.a.lyses with a meticulous examination of the firing of cinematic codes operative within a given segment, rife in journals such as Camera Obscura and Wide Angle, I try to look not only at the primary entertainment, storytelling qualities of films, but attempt to consider them as reflections of cultural phenomena.

Movies have always been slow to pick up on new trends and societal predispositions-breakdancing flicks tumbled onto the cineplex screens two years after the fad was hot-but by the time they hit your neighborhood they resonate to att.i.tudes already concretized among the general population. Years after the effects of feminism had manifested themselves in a widespread confusion by men as to how they should now react, publicly and privately, movies reflected their quandary with films of deliberately cultivated sadism and violence toward females. Foreshadowing the unexpected support of Reagan by voters in the heretofore liberal 18-to-35-year-old demographic, such films as the despicable Risky Business come late to an observation that this target audience doesn't give much of a d.a.m.n about the starving children of Ethiopia . . . they want a sinecure at Dow Chemical, complete with a comprehensive retirement plan. After-the-bomb movies are big right now; and only thirty or so years after the initial fears of nuclear holocaust began to dampen our national spirit.

No film is ever made in a vacuum. It is a murky shadow in the cultural mirror. And thus I am glad we no longer lie to each other that what you want is a rating system for what you'll see this weekend, something slight and dopey; that what I'm offering here is an exhaustive series of comments on trivial cinematic exploitation exercises.

Yet synchronistically, my concern this outing is in precisely that quarter: the excuse currently proffered by many filmmakers that we should not judge their product too harshly because it is trivial. Don't take it seriously, we are told, it's only a movie. Excuse as explanation: they want their cake, and they want to eat it, too.

As the subjects of this month's sermon, I selected Streets of Fire and Cloak and Dagger (Universal) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Paramount). All share a less-than-salutary press, and all share a common apologia. Which is: "This isn't real-life, folks, it's just a cartoon. So you can't legitimately lynch us for Sins Against Art that serious films may commit."

First example: Indiana Jones and the Etcetera of Ditto. There will no doubt be those benighted few who will find fault with this film because it seems to be nothing more than a show-off congeries of tricks, stunts and gags we have learned were, for the most part, left over from Raiders of the Lost Ark. These same viewers with disdain will also, no doubt, chastise Steven Spielberg for a certain, how shall we put it delicately, McMartin Pre-School att.i.tude toward children.

They will say that the character of Willie Scott (played by Kate Capshaw), the Shanghai songstress unwillingly dragged into Dr. Jones's latest bloodletting escapade, is demeaning to women because through most of the film she runs around in ever-decreasing circles screaming in terror. They will say that the laws of rationality, not to mention those of gravity and physics, are defied by a three-foot-high Chinese kid dropkicking fanatical, highly-trained, six-foot-four thuggees, and by a mineshaft tram as it leaps its tracks, soars through empty s.p.a.ce and lands nicely on rails beyond the abyss. They will say that the depiction of Third World peoples is racist because they spend most of their time quaking in fear or slavering with deranged evil. They will say there is too much gore because people are shot in the forehead, run through with sabers and the occasional kris, ground under rock-pulverizing wheels, burned alive, have their hearts torn still beating from their bodies, are gnawed to shreds by crocodiles, get smashed against rock walls, blow up in car crashes and otherwise meet their demise through means both mundane and innovative, as with one Wily Oriental Gentleman who gets skewered with a rack of shish-kebob.

Those who object on these grounds, well, let's just say their bread ain't completely toasted.

They have lost touch with reality.

Which is not to say that Indiana Jones and the Thingie of Whatsit has so much as an elephant's fart to do with reality.

Now I happen to like this film, but then I also like liver and onions and abominate sushi, so what does that say about me? I accept with a childlike willingness the suspension of my disbelief, in order that I may more perfectly resonate in contiguity with the intelligence that conceived this adventure: the mind of a thirteen-year-old boy commando, tipsy with dreams conjured by Sir Walter Scott, H. Rider Haggard, Richard Halliburton, Lester Dent, Walter Gibson, Edmond Hamilton and Frank Buck. Lest you doubt my sincerity in this giving-over of myself to this metempirical state, let me rea.s.sure you by a.s.serting that I do understand why it is that a piece of b.u.t.tered bread always falls to the floor b.u.t.tered-side-down. By the same token, and using the same rudimentary knowledge of gravity, I understand that when Indy, Short Round and Willie fall out of that tri-motor in a rubber life raft, they should by all rights turn upside down. (Which would have added a dimension to the fall that would have made the stunt even more exciting, because the raft would have served as a kind of parachute, and they would have been hanging from the life raft's perimeter rope as they dropped toward the Mayapore foothills.) But that's an exercise in logic, the introduction of reality; clearly an inadvisable undertaking, as it would jangle against the impossible view of the received universe that informs such films.) So I do not sit by the carpfire with those who pick nits. I swallow the adventure whole; and if I find it far less of an exhilarating experience than its predecessor, Raiders, it is nonetheless a nifty boy commando imago.

But cake-eating/cake-having disingenuously rears its head when the reviews start coming in. Perhaps it was because of an independent realization on the part of many critics that a certain meanspiritedness was subcutaneously present pa.s.sim the Spielberg-Lucas ouevre and that it was beginning to surface. Released but a few weeks before Gremlins, this film drew only foreshadowings of concern that spiraled up into hysterical gardyloos when Gremlins made its debut. (The phrase that best synthesizes critical alarm is the one I quoted last time, from David Denby's review of Gremlins in the June 18, 1984 issue of New York magazine: "I'm tired of being worked over by these people . . . the master's head-slamming Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; now this creature bash, which flows with the same black blood as the Thuggee rites in Indiana Jones.") But it was a trend, and when groups dedicated to protecting children from Bad Influences began pillorying Spielberg for the child-labor scenes in Temple, Spielberg and allied apologists riposted with the disclaimer, "It's all in fun. It's not supposed to be real. It's a cartoon."

Bear that line in mind.

Second example: Streets of Fire.

Oft-used phrases no longer available to me: "Director Walter Hill can do no wrong." Remember Hard Times (which he also co-wrote) in 1975; The Driver (that shamefully undervalued homage to the Parker crime novels of Donald Westlake writing as "Richard Stark") in 1978; the extraordinary production of The Warriors in 1979; Alien, which he co-produced in the same year; The Long Riders in 1980; the absolutely paralyzing terror of Southern Comfort in 1981; and 48 Hours in 1982, providing the perfect debut vehicle for Eddie Murphy; remember those films? Films of originality, incredible movement and power; artistically conceived with a core understanding that they must entertain first and convey philosophical subtext second; filled with fresh insights, and joyously overflowing with images that continue to smolder long after you've left the theater.

Of all the directors I ever wanted to work with, Walter Hill has been for me, as a scenarist, the Impossible Dream.

I'm such a goggle-eyed fan of Walter Hill's work that I had trouble, for at least the first half hour, accepting that Streets of Fire is as dreadfully emptyheaded as it appeared to be. But as we say in the world of periodonture, Streets of Fire masticates the ma.s.sive one. My gut aches when I say this, but it is pure c.r.a.p from start to stop. I simply cannot understand how WalterferchrissakesHill! could have done a film this vapid. The Warriors was an astonishing exercise in surrealism masquerading as a gang rumble flick; so far ahead of its time that it caused riots when it opened: an augury of urban malignity that made popcorn sociology like The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause recede into the realm of show biz melodrama where they belong. It was a tough, yet poetic, stylized yet mimetic, fantastic yet naturalistic warping of perceived reality that remains as fresh today as the day it was shot.

And for some G.o.ddam dumb reason Walter Hill chose to take his success with the flawed 48 Hours (ironically, the weakest of his works) and invest it in a production so soph.o.m.oric and purely lamebrained that reason founders. He has, in effect, remade The Warriors badly. Reportedly given carte blanche by Universal to make any film that piqued his fancy, within twenty-four hours after 48 Hours broke box-office records, Hill signed the deal for Streets of Fire. He is one of the few truly intelligent American directors unhampered by delusions of auteurism. His comments about what he was trying to do with Streets, in prerelease interviews (notably in an interview he gave to Kay Anderson in the September 1984 issue of Cinefantastique), were astonishing: "I've always been struck by the morality fables of the Middle Ages, which take place in a framework that looks very real, but in which the events could be outside of reality. Our fantasies, however, tend to be extrapolated into another type of technology, usually futuristic. But if you tell people the film is 'on an interior landscape,' they look at you with question marks. In an unfamiliar setting, people pay attention to the background, trying to orient themselves, instead of just glancing over the familiarity of a here-and-now backdrop."

In those few phrases Hill codifies the esthetic for fantastic film, a series of concepts that the Peter Hyamses and John Carpenters of the world never seem fully to comprehend.

Yet even with his head on straight, and his sensibilities well-ordered, Hill has turned out an expensive exercise in babble. With bubblegum heavymetal new-wave trash music mixed so badly that everything comes up succotash; with cinematography and production design that are the equivalent of purple prose, much of it in a ghastly roast beef red; with mindless violence and a plot that had audiences across the country roaring with unintended laughter; with performances by drone children who must think Stanislavski is a triple-decker sandwich one might order at Nate'n'Al's or the Stage Deli; with nothing going for it save Diane Lane's jailbait sensuality (and on the evidence of her first dozen films, apparently that's where her thespic abilities end) and newcomer Amy Madigan's gritty interpretation of the a.s.skicking reiver McCoy (a part originally written for a guy), Streets of Fire was the big Holiday Bomb for Universal. They had the highest expectations, outdid themselves with the kind of hype advertising that should have resulted in queues as long as the Children's Crusade, the videos were omnipresent on MTV, they block-booked it for saturation play . . . and it went into the dumper so fast it produced a Doppler that could shatter cardboard.

Now we're not talking duds like De Palma or Arthur Hiller (whose batting average is three good films in a thirty-year career, currently onscreen with Teachers, which ain't one of the three). This is Walter Hill I'm talking about!

Yet even with his keen understanding of what it takes to create that special interior landscape of magic realism, Hill's conception is superficial and spavined.

And the apologia was entered even before the judgment of critics and audience came in. On the jacket of the alb.u.m of music from the film's soundtrack, Hill has a note dated May, 1984, that reads as follows: "Streets of Fire is, by design, comic book in orientation, mock-epic in structure, movie heroic in acting style, operatic in visual style and cowboy-cliche in dialogue. In short: a rock'n'roll fable where the Leader of the Pack steals the Queen of the Hop and Soldier Boy comes home to do something about it." And he tops off the justification with a quote from Borges: "'A quite different sort of order rules them, one based not on reason but on a.s.sociation and suggestion-the ancient light of magic.'"

Walter Hill, heretofore a filmmaker on the highest reach of innovation and intellect, has made a film about which the most salient he can say is, "It's a comic book, a parody."

Bear that line in mind.

Third example: Cloak and Dagger.

Remember what I said earlier about motion pictures-which should be on the cutting edge of cultural phenomena-coming in late as an octogenarian struggling uphill in terms of fad subjects like breakdancing, CB radio talk, punk clothing, etcetera? Well, Cloak and Dagger hopped onto the scene all brighteyed and bushytailed with videogames as a major element, as if it were five years ago and we hadn't seen Atari, et al., gasping for survival, with videogame arcades manifesting the business equivalent of cardiac infarction. Fresh concept, very fresh.

A remake of the 1947 suspense film The Window starring the late Bobby Driscoll (for which he won an Oscar as best child actor), based originally on a Cornell Woolrich short story, Cloak and Dagger is a contemporary updating of the "imaginary playmate" trope. The current Bobby Driscoll, E.T.'s Henry Thomas, is one of those mythic whiz kids we see on the cover of Time and Business Week: imbued with a natural facility for computerstuff that is supposed to shame those of us who still use a manual typewriter into feeling as though we're Cromerian. He is pals with a Bondian father-figure spy named Jack Flack, protagonist of the eponymous fantasy role-playing game Cloak and Dagger. The kid's dream life overlaps the real world on the occasion of his witnessing the murder of an FBI man; and the spies come after him. Jack Flack appears onscreen in the flesh (a dual role for the always interesting Dabney Coleman as the double-ought adventurer and as the kid's father) and advises him how to escape danger.

There isn't much more to it than that, and taken on its own terms it's a frothy confection no better or worse than many another such matinee offering. It's the kind of flick that would have been a cute B feature back in the Forties. Not that a budget in the multimillions should recommend for greater attention a film this slight, but when a movie costs this much, was touted this heavily, and had such solid studio support, and it doesn't draw an audience and is quickly pulled, out come the rationalizations. Which wouldn't hold our interest any longer than alibis usually do, save that once again the apologists countered critical attacks with the now-familiar threnody, "It's not supposed to be realistic; it's just sci-fi fantasy, you know. A cartoon."

And at last, having set this up with examples, we come to the core of the contestation. Are these cartoons? Should they be judged on less exacting grounds than "real" movies? Why is it almost always a film of fantasy or sf that gets dismissed in this way? Does the audience swallow such disclaimers?

Let me first establish-on your behalf-feelings of animosity and disgust at the mendacity inherent in this concept of "cartoon." Whenever someone hits you with a conversational shot that is crude or is intended to hurt, and you bristle, the shooter quickly throws up his/her hands and tries to get you to believe, "I was only kidding. It was all in fun. Boy, are you overreacting. You musn't take it seriously, it was just a joke." Well, we know it wasn't any such thing. It was a snippet of truth slipping past the cultural safeguards that keep us dealing with one another with civility. It was for real. Similarly, when such films as Streets of Fire and Gremlins and Temple of Doom are made, we are expected to take them seriously enough to plonk down five bucks for a ticket. When they fail to deliver what they've promised in all those tv clips, and we express our anger at having been fleeced, the shooters tell us we're overreacting and we should feel a lot better about losing our five or ten or whatever amount they got out of us, because it was all a gag.

I wonder how well they'd take the gag if we paid for the tickets with counterfeit bills. Or pried open the firedoor at the theater and sneaked in with the entire Duke University Marching Band. "It was all a joke, fellahs; don't take it so seriously; gawd, are you overreacting!"

No, they cannot have that cake and eat it, too. If we are expected to look with solemnity on all the superhype that works as support system for even the least of these films-short films on The Making of Cloak and Dagger, or a dozen others; clips on Entertainment Tonight that take us behind the scenes; items the pr people have cleverly slipped into the NBC, CBS and ABC nightly news programs with some pseudo-"event" cachet; trailers in movie houses; four="color" lithography on those doublespreads in every publication from TV Guide to American Film; all the primetime crashbang commercials; the billboards; the endlessly imaginative apparat of publicity that whelms us-then they cannot, dare not, must not, had d.a.m.ned well better not, come at us with cop-out cries of "We was only foolin', folks!"

As for the morality of telling us a live-action feature is a "cartoon," I must enter in your behalf even greater disgust and rancorous feelings. A cartoon is a cartoon! And a cartoon is a simulacrum of live action. They may not, at risk of tar and feathers, wriggle with that back-formation. They cannot tell us that first came reality, then cinematic reflection of reality, then cartoon interpretation as simulacrum of reflected reality, and then live-action as parody of cartoon interpretation of reflected reality! They are simply lying. It has as much validity as George Wallace nattering on about "state's rights" when what he's really saying is, "Let's keep the n.i.g.g.e.rs in chains."

It is the most repugnant, vilest sort of dissembling; and that so many filmgoers and alleged movie buffs (like Bill Warren and Steve Boyett) go for that okeydoke, is disheartening. For shame, youse guys!

Which leads me to the final consideration of this essay, which is why does this "cartoon" cop-out always seem to attach to the sort of films one finds reviewed in a science fiction or fantasy magazine?

I think the answer contains the deepest sort of insult.

Because sf and fantasy have always been considered trash by "serious" filmmakers, the sort of stories that a director chooses to film as a lark, not to be taken as seriously as his/her "important" work, it follows that dismissing a failure and the fools who went to see it as a cartoon intended for cartoon-lovers, is logical. No one ever heard the makers of, say, Gandhi, suggest to its critics that it wasn't intended as meaningful, that it was just a lark. Not even a Dirty Harry flick gets that kind of write-off. Oh, perhaps, it might extend to the last ten years' James Bond travesties, but I cannot think of too many other candidates for the life-as-cartoon award.

But "sci-fi" and fantasy are clearly marketing fodder; visual aids to sell gremlin soft toys; loss-leaders intended to lure us to the popcorn and candy counter; elegant merde shot with state of the art SFX on the new ultrafast Kodak 5293 film. Only that which is conceived as intended for a less discriminating audience would dare to be palmed off as unworthy of complaint on the same level as that directed toward "real" movies, "serious" movies, "important" movies.

The excuse that we weren't supposed to be bothered by mean-spiritedness in Gremlins, the brutality toward children in Temple of Doom, the violence and emptyheadedness blown on a breeze of rock'n'roll in Streets of Fire, the plot silliness of Cloak and Dagger because they are just "cartoons" intended for a malleable, substandard intelligence audience that will settle for zooming rocketships and flashing light-shows, is a reflection of the deepest-held views of those who run the film industry.

And as long as they can make a buck or five or ten from such a gullible audience, we can stop asking Why doesn't Hollywood make good sf films?

For my part, when I want a cartoon, I'll turn on Daffy Duck. Until that time, when I hear the apologia, I will respond as would the Tasmanian Devil.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / March 1985 INSTALLMENT 8:.

In Which Some Shrift Is Given Shortly, Some Longly, And The Critic's Laundry Is Reluctantly Aired

Uncle Ayjay (to whom I seem to make reference an inordinate number of times, though reports that we are "an item" are wholly unfounded; we are just friends, despite USA Today's front page revelation on December 13th that he gave me a 20-carat oval sapphire engagement ring) once, a long time ago, when he was trying to teach me how to write, said: "It is not acceptable in trying to create characterization to say, 'He looked exactly like Cary Grant, except the ears were larger.'" By extension, what Obergruppenfuehrer Budrys was telling me, is that describing something solely by reference to an existing icon ain't strictly kosher. I mention this as admission of malice aforethought when I write the words that follow: In 1983 20th Century Fox released a film t.i.tled Monsignor, starring Christopher Reeve. In merely one year it has levitated to the top of the list of Worst Movies Ever Made. Worse than Plan 9 from Outer s.p.a.ce; worse than A Countess from Hong Kong; worse than The Terror of Tiny Town; worse than The Oscar.

Monsignor is the most astonishingly stupid, cataclysmically wrong-headed, awesomely embarra.s.sing, universally inept stretch of celluloid ever thrown onto a movie screen. One views the film with one's mouth agape in stunned disbelief that so many alleged professionals could so totally have taken leave of their senses as to delude themselves that this cosmic stinkeroonie was worth making; or, having so deluded themselves that, once having screened it, the abomination was worth releasing save for cruel laughter. Monsignor is an Olympian exercise in imbecility.

Describing something solely by reference to an existing icon ain't strictly kosher.

Supergirl (Tri-Star Pictures) exists and functions on precisely and exactly the intellectual and artistic level of Monsignor.

This has been a review.

On the other hand, Tri-Star has given us a genuinely spiffy sf adventure written and directed by Michael Crichton; goes by the name Runaway. And it is what, in my view, a good sf movie ought to be: imaginative, logically consistent, entertaining, unpredictable, exciting and filled with stuff we've never seen. It's not dripping with memorable characterization, but apart from that one scant deficiency which is an acceptable trade-off for the goodies it proffers in abundance (and a last line I can live without), Runaway is the filmic equivalent of "a good read."

Tom Selleck is engagingly cast as a police sergeant in charge of the Runaway Squad of a major metropolitan city's law enforcement department in the not-too-distant. Runaways are robots that have gone bonkers and are doing what they oughtn't. The first part of the film swiftly and neatly delineates a society almost identical to today's, with the addition of many kinds of household and industrial machines that perform the kind of scutwork labor white folks abhor and consign to peoples bearing green cards. And though prophesying what our world will be like twenty years hence, with robots to do our cooking and welding, is a mugg's game (and not even sf's vaunted claims of being able "to predict the future" hold up under close historical scrutiny), Crichton has been a model of rect.i.tude injecting those little extrapolative touches we all slaver for. It all seems plausible, which is the most we should ever ask of this kind of woolgathering.

When people start getting killed by otherwise innocuous mechanical helpmates, Selleck finds himself going mano-a-mano with the psychopathic high-tech killer, Dr. Luther, played with exquisite malevolence by rock star Gene Simmons, leader of Kiss. (Who walked up to me at the screening to say he was a fan of my work, and scared the s.h.i.t out of me even without his concert makeup. Thank G.o.d he didn't stick out his tongue at me.) Additionally, as if a good original plot, endless action, terrific visuals and heartstopping danger were not enough, Runaway showcases the talents and beauty of three women for whom one might gladly burn the topless towers of Ilium: Cynthia Rhodes, Kirstie Alley and Anne-Marie Martin (regularly seen on the Days of Our Lives daytime serial). Now ordinarily, making a remark about the pulchritude of the actresses in a film would get both Vonda and Joanna tsk-tsking at me; but since the star of this movie is a s.e.x object for women, I take obscene advantage of the opportunity to reprise that blissfully ignorant condition of chauvinism in which I existed for thirty years before Vonda and Joanna put me on the floor with their knees in my chest and pointed out logically where my thinking was screwed.

As for that last line, it's goodness knows a tiny enough nit, but I mention it so Michael doesn't do it again. At the end of the film-and I'm giving nothing away by telling you this, trust me-Selleck and Rhodes have fallen in love. Both are cops, and both have performed athletically and competently throughout the story. But as they kiss, Selleck says to her, "Do you cook?" She answers, "Try me." Apart from the grating cliche of "try me" (which, if the universe is kind, I will never hear from a movie screen again as long as I live or even after, on a level of awful familiarity with someone saying "Just like that?" and reply being "Just like that"), and the recidivist resonance of times past when no matter how competent a woman might be at non-housewifely occupations, she would only be fulfilled as a "real woman" if she could cook and clean and bear homunculi, the film prominently includes Lois, a cook/babysitter robot in Selleck's home. So Ms. Rhodes should have replied to Sgt. Ramsay's question with a line something like, "I don't have to; Lois can do it. I can f.u.c.k; Lois can't do that."

But perhaps I ask too much of the universe. Then again, when I'm elected G.o.d this year . . .

The ultimate variation of the cinematic convention commonly referred to as "Boy and Girl meet cute" (ref. Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli in Arthur) can be found in a sappy, nay, goofy, clinker called Starman (Columbia Pictures).

Here in glamorous but Machiavellian Hollywood the Writers Guild has long fought the battle of the possessive credit. You know what I mean: Walt Disney's Pinocchio (written by Carlo Collodi); Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (written by John Briley); Brian De Palma's Scarface (written by Oliver Stone). Directors can continue to flummox the studios and the public only as long as they can continue to cloud our thinking with the auteur theory that puts them forward as "the creator" of a film. We are talking about power and money in the possessive credit. They get around it in a thousand ways, this bad feeling they stir in those of us who actually create the dream: A Brian De Palma Film / Brian De Palma's Film of / A Film of Brian De Palma . . . you get the idea. So the Writers Guild goes on fighting this one, against the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild, and not much progress is made, because we're talking about power and money.

However, in the case of John Carpenter's Starman, I suspect not even bamboo slivers under the fingernails could get scenarists Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon to ask for the possessive credit. It's that dumb.

(On the other hand, which I've been doing a lot in this installment, they are the guys who wrote this emgalla, so who's to say how deeply runs their brain damage.) (Emgalla: a South African wart hog.) Starman's plot is at least thirty-five years old. It is a first contact story that acts as if The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing (1951), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) had never been made. Out goes our s.p.a.ce probe, it's found by an alien intelligence, the e.t. comes to Earth, the e.t. shape-changes to a.s.sume the persona of a woman's dead husband, they fall in love, he runs around a lot trying to evade people trying to capture him, he gives her a baby, and he leaves the planet. No explanation is ever given as to why he was here or why, if he went to the trouble to come here, he runs around madly trying to escape contact with the species he sought to contact in the first place.

Again we have the stupidity of a s.p.a.ceship whoooooshing noisily past in airless vacuum, again we have the inept and malevolent scientists and military schmucks who seek only to imprison or kill the visitor, again we have soph.o.m.oric definitions of "love" and "friendship" as explicated by subliterate characters.

What we have here is a 1948 movie made in 1984.

A waste of time.

A contrived, simpleminded, sappy film. My patience is fast running out with John Carpenter, who is a talented man, yet who seems h.e.l.lbent on cranking out one dreary clot after another. And they crucified Michael Cimino for Heaven's Gate.

Just wait'll I'm elected.

I'll save 2010 and Dune till next time, because it has become necessary to say something about The Terminator (Orion Pictures).

Yes, folks, I'm more than painfully aware that The Terminator resembles my own Outer Limits script "Soldier" in ways so obvious and striking that you've been moved to call me, write letters, send me telegrams and pa.s.s the gardyloo along by word-of-mouth with my friends. You really must cease waking me in the wee hours to advise me I've been ripped off.

As I write this, attorneys are talking.

Despite the foregoing, permit me to recommend The Terminator. It is a superlative piece of work and deserves its success. Director and co-author James Cameron has made an auspicious debut. The film is taut, memorable, and clearly based on brilliant source material. More than that I am not at liberty to say.

If for no other reason, I would celebrate this nifty movie on the grounds that someone has, at last, figured out a way to use Arnold Schwartzenegger effectively. I suppose I'm a bit tired of seeing that Friday the 13th horror ending in which the dead monster comes back to life again and again, but in context it plays like a baby doll this time.

Now if you go to see this movie, I want you to put out of your minds all memory of "Soldier" or my other Outer Limits script "Demon with a Gla.s.s Hand" or my short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Also, do not think of a green cow.

I would be less than responsible if I did not recommend a few non-sf films for your attention.

Beverly Hills Cop with Eddie Murphy is a joy. It was directed by Marty Brest, who needs a hit, so go see it. And do take notice of the actor who plays the role of Taggart, a cop. His name is John Ashton, and he d.a.m.ned near steals the film from Murphy, if you can conceive of such a thing.

Don't miss David Lean's first film in fourteen years, based on the exquisite novel by E. M. Forster, A Pa.s.sage to India. You might even read the book first, couldn't hurt.